A London judge ordered Dubai's ruler to provide £554 million to the ex-wife whose phone he had hacked

Princess Haya bint al-Hussein, half-sister of King Abdullah II of Jordan, married Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, ruler of Dubai, in 2004. In April 2019 she fled to London with their two children. In fact-finding judgments, Sir Andrew McFarlane found on the balance of probabilities that the sheikh had ordered the abduction of two of his adult daughters, Shamsa in 2000 and Latifa in 2002 and 2018, and had run a campaign of intimidation against Haya. In October 2021 the court found that her phone and her lawyers' phones had been hacked with Pegasus spyware by agents of the sheikh. On 21 December 2021 Mr Justice Moor ordered a lump sum of £251.5 million for Haya's lifetime security and a £290 million guarantee for the children's maintenance, about £554 million in total, the largest award of its kind in an English court. Most of the money was for security against what the judge called a grave risk from the sheikh himself. Haya had not claimed money as an ex-wife in her own right.